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riends, countrymen: Of feta and crosses I sing.
I sing of honor and religion, and a special, special blessing, and many long processions and too much Greek dancing, and of 15,000 people who gathered in Tarpon on a late Sunday morning.
In Tarpon they watched as 59 brothers all dove together, for that special blessing, from His Eminence Archbishop Demetrios, a coveted honor.
In Tarpon they watched as one man-child found the cross, the cross of wood and metal, cast into the Spring Bayou, for he was the Chosen, who deserved the Jesus blessing, and they knew he was a hero, because he found the cross faster, and declared him their victor.
And so I sing of victory, which looks something like this:

Dashing, ain’t he? Introducing 18-year-old Chris Kavouklis, senior at Tampa’s Jesuit High and retriever of the 2008 Epiphany cross.
I’ll spare you another round of dactylic epic verse — they’re as exhausting now as they were in high school Latin class! — to say in plain prose that this weekend, I hit the mother lode of quirky cultural events.

Every January, the town of Tarpon Springs’ Greek residents (i.e. basically everyone) spend the afternoon on the banks of the murky Spring Bayou watching several dozen teenage boys dive in after a cross tossed in by a visiting archbishop. It’s called the Epiphany celebration — this year marked the 102nd — and whoever retrieves it gets a trophy and special blessing for the year, becomes a neighborhood celebrity and scores the chance to see his father weep and weep with gratitude.
They say that’s a big deal when you’re Greek.

Naturally, I’d been looking forward to the spectacle for months. Watching really big crowds of really emotional people getting really worked up is one of my favorite things to do in the world; eating souvlaki is another. So on sunny Sunday morning, I headed over to St. Nicholas’ Greek Orthodox Cathedral on Pinellas Ave., where the boys were readying themselves for their solemn parade to the water’s edge.
This meant a full morning of ritual — photo-ops with family and the media, Sunday mass inside the church’s decadently buttressed interior, with each participant hiding his nerves through clenched smiles and stopping to answer tourists’ questions.
“Is this the entrance?” one tourist asked me in slow, loud English, as if I would know. (Fact: In a sea of Greeks, apparently I blend.)
Pointing toward the Cathedral, the tourist cocked his ear toward the chanting.
I nodded.
“We’re Irish Catholic,” he laughed. “But it’s all the same.”
Standing in his bathing suit near the entrance and sporting a blue-and-white “Epiphany Day 2008” T-shirt, Nick Stamas, 18, explained that it was a great honor being chosen to participate; he’d watched the event every year since he was young.
Demetri Halkias, meanwhile, said he’d been training with his father all week for the cold water.

You nervous? I asked.
Halkias, 16, sighed and looked down at his feet. “Yeah, a little,” he said.
This was a time to be wise, motivational, heroic.
“I hear the water’s dirty,” I said.

Soon, the march down to the bayou was underway. Heading the procession, Michael Xipolitas and Irene Koulianos, last year’s retriever and the “dove bearer” respectively, led the boys in order of age. The archbishop, flanked by a mess of cops, plodded in back.

Down at Spring Bayou, an enormous crowd had already formed.

That’s about as close as I got, which should tell you something.

While everyone agreed on the religious subtext of the event — “God decides which of us will retrieve the cross,” was every young diver’s favorite maxim on Epiphany morning — surprisingly few were able to say where the dive custom originated.
Mostly, though, the scene resembled a giant sporting event, with the crowd battling for standing room outside the arena. Thickly pomaded fathers hoisted their kids onto their shoulders, teen boys snuck curious peeks at their female companions, mothers whooped when their sons walked by.
The tourists craved souvlaki.
“Just tell us where the food is,” cracked one member of a visiting group of Red Hat Ladies in from Davenport, Fla.
Applause greeted the Archbishop Demetrios when he reached the water’s edge.
And then a hush.
And then an “Okay, you can go now!”
And then … several splashes of water?

It all happened so fast.

Kavouklis retrieved the cross in about 13 seconds. He was one of a pair of diving identical twins on the roster, so naturally, the wrong name was announced.

That’s not Michael. It’s Chris.

I mean, man, talk about a cross to bear: Not only losing the “God Chose Me” award to your doppelganger, but then having to spend the rest of the day awkwardly reminding everyone?

Michael, wherever you are, this blog post is for you, buddy. The archbishop we ain’t, but you sure got our blessing.

David Zietz contributed to this report.

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